INDIA AGAINST ITSELF

By James Traub ; James Traub is author of ''India: The Challenge of Change.''

Published: June 12, 1984

At a time when Indians seem ever more ready to kill one another over religious, class, language and ethnic differences, the Government's military assault on the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar looms as a terrifying failure of the democratic process. Reports that several detachments of Sikh troops have mutinied seem no less ominous.

Both the Government and leaders of the Sikh agitation proved all too willing to abandon civil discourse for armed force. But India cannot settle its manifold differences with gunfire; every violent act will beget a more violent reaction. Without a renewed faith in democracy, India, always deeply divided, may not survive as a cohesive nation.

In the aftermath of the slaying of hundreds of people in the temple, including the Sikhs' most militant leaders, reconciliation between the Government and Sikhs seems almost impossible. Demands made by relatively moderate Sikh leaders over the last two years may have been unreasonable but they were scarcely unnegotiable - a greater share of local river water; complete control over Punjab's now-divided state capital, Chandigahr; recognition in the Constitution of Sikhism's status as a major faith. Initially, Mrs. Gandhi refused to negotiate. Failing to recognize the signs of passionate feeling in Punjab, she dismissed Sikh demands as grumblings of a defeated political party.

When it became clear that Sikh agitation would not disappear merely by being deprecated, Mrs. Gandhi made several half-hearted attempts at negotiation. This display of insincerity only stoked the Sikhs' anger, and the movement bloomed from civil disobedience into terrorism. By the time she was willing to take seriously the political process of appeasement and conciliation, the Sikhs were not. Her Congress Party conceded on issues it once refused to discuss, but the violence continued. Thus, Mrs. Gandhi managed to turn a political situation into a military one.

Perhaps the horror of the past week - the bloodiest confrontation ever between the army and Indian citizens - will persuade the Sikhs to call off their agitation; if so, Mrs. Gandhi's faith in the efficacy of force will be vindicated. Yet such a denouement seems likely only if one assumes, as she does, that the Sikhs' aspirations weren't serious in the first place. What seems more probable is that

the Sikhs will continue to smolder with wounded ethnic pride, and a leaderless terrorist movement will wholly supplant the agitation of previous years. Already the disturbance seems to have moved beyond Punjab; until now, the army has offered a rare symbol of ethnic integration, but that may be shattered. When Sikh troops deserted in the northeast, the army was forced to fire on itself. The basic pattern of Mrs. Gandhi's political conduct can be seen in her insistence that Punjab's deep-seated grievances added up to nothing more than partisan power-mongering and nothing less than a challenge to her authority. She has consistently questioned the patriotism of opposition leaders and has tried to discredit or overthrow state governments run by one of the opposition parties. In early 1983, several thousand villagers died in Assam, in the northeast, when she insisted on holding an election that intelligence officials advised her would tear the state apart. The root of India's problem is that Mrs. Gandhi seems unable to accept the legitimacy of any opposition: Compromise is foreign to her nature. In the four months I recently spent traveling around India, I heard everywhere - from villagers, intellectuals, fellow train passengers - virtual hopelessness about the Congress Party's willingness to democratically engage the nation's social and economic problems. From party members I heard little beyond an automatic, quite chilling, obedience to the Gandhi line. What India needs, says Mrs. Gandhi and party leaders, is strength, competence and single- mindedness; liberty, they say, is likely to degenerate into chaos. Yet the nation never has faced more chaos than it does today. Regional and ethnic loyalties are on the rise. The poor have been galvanized by years of promises, and almost daily one reads of Untouchables, tribal villagers and others rising up against local tyrants. Something seems wrong with Mrs. Gandhi's argument. India has survived as a stable nation since independence, in 1947, precisely because it has had a democratic system, in which clashing ambition and expectation could be reconciled through voting and political pressure. Only by reaffirming this tradition can India hope to keep its own foundations solid. If Mrs. Gandhi continues to seal up her party, and thus the Government, from competing ideas and interests, she may hang on to power but India will be plunged ever more deeply into violence.